Topic: [ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning - page 1268. (Read 2007155 times)

+1, if only everyone knew how much of the worlds software is Java.

One of the most interesting things you've written, CfB. I like NXT even more, now.

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=100/conference-testnet-and-fundraiser-updates

There you go

I would like to comment on behalf of eMunie and state that LeoC is a low life, that we have had a run in with already.

He thinks that he can blackmail people into doing what he says, what he doesn't know about his long trail of identities on the web.

Whoever that was affected by LeoC please message me and we can take swift action.

[and for the record, we have not noticed any slight slowdown in investments, so disregard his threats]

Unless there are serious changes to the IPO, I won't be investing. Poor communication from the devs, a seemingly lackadaisical approach towards the very people who would enable Ethereum. Very important things ( algorithm, IPO structure etc) are altered often. If you're going to do an IPO, at least have the basics figured out . Otherwise, what are you asking money for? Hopes and dreams?

I think Ethereum is off to a bad start for the following reason. The devs announced it prematurely. I'm sure that Vitalik was excited to get the word out, but I feel this decision led to some negative consequences. Public perception of the developers' reliability and integrity have been hurt. What's the point of announcing a currency for which you haven't even decided on an algorithm?  At this point there are far too many uncertainties for the prudent investor to invest. Furthermore, not only is is a high risk investment, but the IPO structure looks almost as if its been designed to limit an investor's profit. If I'm investing in something as high risk as Ethereum, I want a handsome reward if things pan out well. However, the inflation present in Ethereum severely limits your potential return. I'd rate Ethereum (Under the current IPO structure)as very high risk, low to medium reward.

You try to blackmail the guy for $8000 and then accuse HIM of breaking forum rules? WTF?

The facts were that Turing complete = malicious contracts. Another fact is that there is no where listed how much the devs are allowed to "get paid" using the IPO BTC. Yet another fact was that dagger was flawed and they had to make last minute changes to the whole entire system. Yet another fact is now people are no longer investing via the whitepaper because the change were so large that the whitepaper is no longer relevant, so essentially there is no whitepaper. Yet another fact is they use clever wording to describe who exactly has selling limits, so there might very well be many "founders" that can dump day 1. Doesn't matter what my motives are. Seriously who gives a shit about the community, this isn't facebook kid. Crypto was created for one reason, as an alternative to fiat. We are talking about money here, and money talks. Go ahead and send them all your money, I will die laughing when two things happen to you, one, you instantly lose 50% of your investment on day one, and two you get your wallet stolen when you try to run a contract you thought was legit. Theres a sucker born every minute.


Sums up Ethereum quite well. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Presuming that you had any relevant 'facts' (doubtful, IMO), you've already shown your true colors and chosen to go for personal profit via threats rather than contribute to the community. I think that speaks volumes about your motive and character. Best of luck convincing others that you participate in any way for their benefit.

So far judging from the responses on all Ethereum forums here is what I see.  Most of the people posting on this forum and almost all the people that were at the Miami Conference praising Ethereum are developers.  There is genuine potential for this platform to be groundbreaking if done right.  The devs that are shilling for the Ethereum to succeed have either been involved in pre-fund raising before and want to see this succeed for selfish reasons or they believe in Ethereum  and are planning to monetize this platform in the future and want to see Ethereum succeed for selfish reasons.

Then you have the other half of the devs that are not involved with the project, see there are too many risks involved and fearful of wall street taking over the crypto industry.

Where I feel there is a severe disconnect is that the majority of opinions on this forum, Reddit, etc.. are developers and they will constitute less that 1% of the total amount of investment capital that Ethereum is trying to raise.  

If you go to a Conference where the entire majority of reporters have a dev background, you are basically looking at the very definition of a biased opinion and reporting.  Just because a small group of technology advanced individuals are excited about the possibility of the tech, doesn't actually mean equate a great investment.

Then you have the 99% of the general crypto population that are only interested in making a quick profit on this coin.  They are not particularly interested in this new coin/platform and don't really care about the technology and only if there will be enough ROI to justify an initial investment into the pre-sale.  Initially, there was a lot of hype on this coin that drew a lot of interest, but crypto investors cannot be duped.  They realize they are not getting into this investment at the ground floor level and with the amount of money/bitcoin that Ethereum is trying to raise before launch, there will have to be 100 million dollar market cap for them to see a profit.  Long-term is the only reason to invest.  There are few pump and dump scenarios that will work with this investment structure that Ethereum is proposing because all the initial "pump" profit is being taken out of the market and into Ethereum's pocket right from the beginning.

Long term I see a lot of risks involved with pre-sale investment.
1/ There is risk of immediate loss of equity once it hits an exchange.
2/ There is risk of dilution
3/ There is risk of the company dissolving or bankrupting (however small)
4/  There is risk of this becoming vaporware
5/  There is risk that it will be forked and cloned
6/  There is risk that there will be too many security holes
7/  There is risk that a newer and better technology with greater funding and transparency will enter the market in due time
8/  There is risk that the altcoin (or platform if you want to call it that) crypto market will crash in a few years
9/   There is a risk (and I personally feel strongly about this) that the price will be considerably lower once it hits an exchange and falls to what the market feels is an appropriate price for the amount of risk and dilution involved with the project.

Of course, I could be wrong and Ethereum totally sells out and there will be another 100 million worth of btc bid aftermarket.  But do you really think that crypto investors are dying to jump in to give anyone 100 million on vaporware on a diluted investment? ALL you have to look at is the forum boards and ignore the developers who are shilling for the product to succeed.  There is a huge outcry against the current investment scheme.  Why are people so vehemently against Ethereum's structure?  Because they feel it has a possibility to be an asset to the bitcoin community but not the way its currently structured.  

So in final words, whether you believe in the tech or not, all you have to ask yourself is this.  Would I be better off investing in the pre-sale or should I invest aftermarket?

There is absolutely only ONE reason you should buy into the pre-sale, if you believe that it will be so much oversold and the market will not feel that it's diluted to the point where there is another huge group of buyers willing to take it off your hands and xxx times a return on your investment right from the beginning of launch.

Now I submit to you a few simple reasons why you should wait until aftermarket to buy-in.

1/  You NEGATE any risk mentioned earlier in the post and you only have to consider risk/reward.  If I buy in pre-sale what risk do I take vs the reward I will have for taking that risk.  Do you think there is greater chance that the market price will be higher than lower from the pre-sale price?  And to what degree do you need to see Ethereum trade at to make this pre-sale investment worth it for you.
2/  Time value - What could have I done with this money invested in Ethereum that will be locked up from pre-sale until launch on a legitimate market.  During those two or three months, you could have that money invested in Bitcoin (which has a lot less downside and at the current level has a good chance of increasing in value) or a dozen new altcoins that will be launching that as you can see we are in the midst of a crypto coin boom.  How much money will you have lost by freezing your money up in Ethereum, when it could be actively invested in other more profitable ventures where the initial investment is not severely diluted?
3/  During the time you buy into the pre-sale (several months) and the time you are able to trade your ETH on an exchange, I guarantee you there will several new teams announcing a new platform or coin that will get much better press with a better investment structure.  You take the risk of obsolescence even before the coin launches.
4/ By buying into the coin pre-sale and making it a success you encourage Wall Street to take over the crypto coin market and in the future you may see an environment where every new coin launch will be diluted and structured in a way that only Wall Street will increase their millions and the RISK will all be burdened by the crypto community.  Ethereum will set a new precedent and if you think this will not happen, think again.  Miners and crypto investors will be locked out of the early "pump" profits while Wall Street makes millions and we will take all the RISK. The early pre-sale investors will essentially be the bagholders.
5/ Here is the most important reason to wait until it hits an exchange to buy into Ethereum, you NEGATE all the risk I mentioned before and plus you do not enable this kind of launch in the future.  There is a good chance that you will be able to buy it lower than the offering price of approx a dollar an ETH. and if the price rises a bit, you can still buy in at the pre-sale price or a little bit higher.  The only reason you should be buying this pre-sale is if you believe that there is another 100 million waiting in line to buy ETH and there is no risk involved.  You have absolutely nothing to lose by waiting and a lot at stake by buying and enabling this type of coin pre-sale launch.

Now, over the next few days I imagine Ethereum will hire a Marketing PR, they will hype and pump the tech and coin and gloss it over to make it look like they invented the wheel.  They will cast out all the doubters and call them "FUD."  Vitalik will come online and answer questions about the tech.  But I say to you forget about all that.  Don't get caught up in the tech, we all  know the tech has the potential to be amazing.  Look at the investment structure.  Dont let Vitalik use excuses like this is the best way to avoid "whales" from taking over the market.  That is so naive.  Think!!! Regardless of the tech, is it more beneficial to me, considering risk vs reward, to buy pre-sale or buy aftermarket?

If you choose pre-sale, then good luck, all I'm asking you is to forget the tech and the chatter from the devs and focus on the pros and con of the investment only.  Live long and prosper!!

It ain't FUD if what I said were FACTS. I gave the guy a chance to get rid of me but he didn't take it and instead decided to break the forum rules by posting a private message publicly. Ethereum will cost investors, miners, and just about everyone involved with the exception of the founders, their hard earned money. Turing complete = you open a contract then find your wallet missing. Instead of reassuring everyone that their money is safe, the idiotic dev decided to change the subject and use ad hominem. What does that tell you, because to me it sounds iffy lol. Who would want to invest in someone like that? Also as everyone has already been constantly mentioning, this IPO is rigged.

Invest with great care

This does not answer the question. What does the blockchain and the PoW aspect have to do with the scripting portion (which is what I was referring to)? Vitalik himself has said that it is possible to create a contract within a contract, likely ad infinitum. This means that a malicious contract could be called by a non malicious contract. These non malicious contracts will essentially be used to masquerade the malicious one. And the layers could make identification much more difficult. The typical end user is highly unlikely to detect such a complex script and by the time someone with the knowhow to spot the malicious code calls them out it will likely have already claimed many victims.

Thanks for sharing this with us and I hope that you hit the report button on this scamster. It's like blackmail, only missing the threat of any actual dirty secrets.

It's what happens when you let ex Goldman Sucks viruses run the show.

I completely agree with per-person limits. But how would you enforce them? That's the problem with bitcoin--it's pseudo-anonymous. A person could just create 5 addresses and send the 50 from each address. The only real alternative I could see would be some form of identity verification a-la-coinbase...but I can only imagine how unpopular that would be!

A workaround might be to do like XCP and limit the number of coins that can come from one address. It would take a bit longer to create wallets, transfer coins to those wallets, and then transfer to the exodus address...although I fear someone could write a script to do just that.

So far as I can tell the security is based on the blockchain and the POW that will be used in roughly the same way bitcoin does this. The big difference is that ethereum scripts are more powerful. I dont see a reason why this introduces new security considerations, but it is certainly a valid point to consider. And still I say this based on my understanding of the model of ethereum and not on the implementation.

Ethanolium,
a bunch of programmers got drunk of premining greed ;-)

No I am not, I am talking within the context of a currency backed by people's hard earned money. Do not put words in my mouth. Hackers are already willing to inject malicious software into non monetary applications, I can only imagine what they would come up with if they found an application that is Turing complete, is used to handle millions of dollars, and thanks to the anonymity of crypto, have no chance of being caught. You are diffusing a valid question with irrelevant and illogical retorts. I'd like a short summary of the methods used to prevent people from doing this. What systems are in place to increase security for the end user?

For those disillusioned or turned off by the IPO but who are still interested in getting involved, I would recommend mining and developing.  Mining a new coin at launch is always a fun experience, especially for folks who haven't done it before.  Also, once high-level abstractions have been made (ruby gem, python port, etc.) hacking around with some easy code would be a worthwhile evaluation.

I'll be curious to see how the IPO goes once it arrives.  Someone should start a betting pool on what the final amount BTC raised will be (or the size of the initial Ether pool).

The forums on their site are pretty sparse at the moment http://forum.ethereum.org/ but meetups have already started to be organized so I would expect this to change rapidly.

You are calling every turing complete programming language out there dangerous and highly insecure. You do not seem to know what you are talking about.